It’s Friday afternoon and I’m embroiled in a Herculean Feat of Organisation. I have a book club meet to set up.
I thought it was set up. Except that I asked if we could set up the meeting for a rolling date, say on the third Sunday of every month, so I don’t have to exchange emails over an entire week to get this set up…
No, wait, let’s start at the beginning.
I wanted to set up a book club. Simple, huh? All I need is a venue, people, and books. The people side of things is sorted because this book club is part of a larger organisation, so I have an audience already connected to the group to invite.
I also have a plan for the books side of things: I can ask the attendees to pick books. I start out with an idea for a free venue and contact them. I like this place because they’re cool and groovy and into cooperatives and all sorts of other good stuff. They’re geeky, basically.
I send an email, get an initial, cheerful, welcoming response and then nothing.
Nada.
I speak to a friend who also uses this venue and eventually get better contacts. I make sure to ask for disabled access, as I know I may have attendees who have wheels, or canes. It’s not just the able of body who reads books, amazingly enough.
That was simple.
Until I showed up on the day and discovered we’d been moved somewhere beyond disabled access.
Facepalm.
Since I’m not in the mood for being messed around I insist we are given access to the area where people with wheels or canes or any other physical limitation can reach. Thankfully, the other group meeting has a sympathetic (or terrified) organiser and we reach an agreement.
A few days later I give feedback and ask to arrange the next meeting, again saying we need to make sure we get disabled access. I get a new date, and all is apparently well.
Then, curses, I decided to ask for a rolling meeting date that would make all our lives easier. This takes a long time. I’m trying to fit into their calendar on a day when they don’t have a big event, to ensure we get the easy-to-access space.
I’m given a date, and then check the calendar to see lots of other events taking place at the same time. Won’t there be a clash? I ask.
Oh no, you’ll be upstairs, out of the way.
Where the people on wheels can’t reach.
I point this out. I’m reassured that things can be arranged so that we can do this. I’m starting to feel a bit frustrated. I decide to cross my fingers and hope, because for some reason, I’m not so certain about this.
Of course, then Facebook decided I couldn’t access my event page to edit the event. It’s already set it up for 1969 once, which baffles me because it’s quite difficult to change the year on Facebook events.
Mystifying. Now I can’t access my event at all. It’s “unavailable”. I have to cancel, apologise to attendees, set it up again and ask my caterer if he’ll please do the new date, thank you.
And to think I woke up this morning after having a lovely dream about puppies.
No, really. Puppies. My subconscious must be sick of all the time I spend writing about the violence of despots at last.
The first lesson in all this is that organising events is very likely to drive you mildly insane very quickly. My mellow, which isn’t terribly mellow at the best of times, was thoroughly harshed.
But I take a few things from this: If you’re a community thing, and you’re aimed at “the community”, or “building a community”, it all falls down if the only people you’re accessible to have working limbs and don’t require wheels or other forms of assistance.
The other thing is this: It makes it very hard to want to support a community thing that’s doing really cool work, if you make it difficult to work with you.
Wonderful community projects and ventures fall down because without a strong organiser behind it, the whole thing struggles to keep going. You want to support them because they’re cool and groovy, but there are some boring, straightforward things you have to be able to do in order to keep functioning.
Then there’s this: As an organiser, I have to learn to be insistent about getting what I want because it’s not really about what I want. It’s about making what we’re doing accessible to everybody. Because a cool and groovy community thing isn’t a cool and groovy community thing if some people can’t even get to it.
